6/22/2010 @ 8:00PM

Bosses Behaving Badly

“I drove an hour across town to get her sushi. When I gave it to her, she threw it out and told me she’d changed her mind.”

You don’t have to watch The Office to know bad boss behavior when you see it. Sure, Steve Carrell’s character is a textbook example of just about every boss don’t: passive aggressive, micromanaging, insanely inane requests. But the premise of Michael Scott is real enough, and can be found in nearly every office.

No one has a better handle on bad bosses than their employees. Just ask them. We did, and we have nightmare boss scenarios from men and women who were eager to share their personal stories (provided we kept their names anonymous). We boiled down the most frequent offenses and asked executive coach Anna Marie Valerio, Ph.D. for her official stamp of (dis)approval and pointers for turning a bad work relationship around.

Micromanaging

Our first case is a manager in the publishing industry who insisted upon being cc’d on every one of her employees’ e-mail correspondences. “She would routinely respond to our e-mails correcting wording or chastising us for the smallest grammatical mistakes,” an employee shares.

Resistance to TMS (too much supervision) is normal. While you have a responsibility to your boss, there are times when people ask too much from you without cause.

“The problem may be that she is paying too much attention to small details because she either has blinders on to the bigger scope of the company, or she is being kept in the dark by her own supervisors, which can create insecurity and bad behavior,” says Valerio, author of Developing Women Leaders.

If you think your boss is asking for more information than you think is necessary, there is no inherent harm in asking why. In a proactive and positive way, that is, because there may be a legitimate reason she needs, in the example of one real estate broker’s boss, “every detail about every client meeting she doesn’t feel like attending.”

Before you talk to your supervisor, though, ask a trusted colleague on another team if this micromanaging behavior is endemic to the company. Also, strategize some open-ended questions for your boss, such as “I’d like to talk about all the information you need from me. I’m wondering how you see it fits into your vision and the big picture of the company.”

“It is a gentle yet proactive way to alert the manager to back off and it can drive the manager to seek out the big picture, which will ultimately help them to be a better supervisor,” says Valerio.

Liar, Liar

Lying is hard to tolerate in any circumstance, but when your boss is a liar it’s sure to foul the workplace dynamic. One professional shares her tale of the time her boss’s lies caught up with him: “He told me I could not take my approved vacation because his own supervisor had planned a retreat for the company during the same week. But my vacation had been approved months in advance and was paid for–and non-refundable.” The worker was told the supervisor expected her to attend the retreat.

Not only was it infuriating, but it wasn’t true. “He had never explicitly asked his supervisor,” she says. In a show of boldness, she asked her boss’s boss herself and was told, of course, that she could go on her vacation as planned.

This lied-to employee did precisely the right thing, says Valerio. “Lying is a symptom of unfair treatment in the workplace,” she says, pointing out other similar types of unfair behaviors, such as favoritism and ignoring certain employees, or rewarding the work of some and not others.

Her advice in tackling unfairness is to work around the supervisor, and create your own networks at work. As a result, you won’t have to rely on any one person, precisely what the vacationing worker did by circumventing her manager and heading directly to his boss.

“It’s very difficult to confront a boss directly about fairness since it can easily come across as combative or accusatory,” says Valerio. “Instead, look around to co-workers. If you’re not receiving truthful information from your manager, you may be able to get it elsewhere if you’ve built a good network of peers within the company.”

Aggression: Active and Passive

“It was my first day on the job, and it was particularly stressful,” shares a junior professional then based in Texas. “We were working hard to get a last-minute event ready, and by 6 p.m. I had finished the paperwork I was responsible for. I decided it would be best for me to get out of everyone’s way and leave the office for the day. When I stopped by my boss’s office to say goodnight, her response was to pick up her computer monitor and throw it at me. It hit the wall, but she threw a computer at me!”

Lucky for the crazed boss, no suits were filed and the young employee reported for work the next morning. Tail between her legs, the supervisor apologized for “unprofessional behavior,” but the relationship between the two was never completely mended.

Workplace aggression appears in more insidious and more frequent ways than flying computers, as evidenced by this story from an advertising sales coordinator. “I’d send my boss an e-mail in the morning with a question or pressing issue that I knew was time-sensitive, and then spend all day waiting for a response,” she begins. “I’d go to lunch, and come back. Nothing.”

Her boss, she says, was in the office, and the two would exchange small-talk, but the e-mail would go unresolved. “She’d even e-mail me about other things, like lunch reservations or orders tracked. But it wouldn’t be until 4:59 that I’d get a response–too late for me to do anything about it but just early enough to catch me before I left the office. It really was infuriating.”

Here again, says Valerio, that’s just plain bad form. “Bosses behaving badly would do well to remember that their reputation will get around,” she says. Employees are quicker to gossip about bad bosses than good ones, and a reputation as a bad leader or a passive-aggressive supervisor could ultimately cost a manager top-notch employees who either leave or do B or C level work for them.

“A manager’s ultimate responsibility is to manage talent within their team to better the company as a whole, a win-win,” says Valerio. “When someone loses sight of that mission, that’s most often when we see bad behavior. It’s a losing situation for everyone involved–the employee, the manager, and most importantly, the entire organization.”